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Volume II, Part Three, Chapter V

Two years before, in 1808, on returning to Petersburg from his tour of his estates, Pierre had involuntarily become the head of Petersburg Freemasonry. He arranged dining and funeral lodges, enrolled new members, busied himself with the union of various lodges and with the acquisition of authentic charters. He gave his own money for the building of temples and made up, as far as he could, the collections of alms, toward which the majority of members were stingy and irregular. He almost alone, at his own expense, maintained the house for the poor that the order had established in Petersburg.

His life meanwhile went on as before, with the same enthusiasms and dissoluteness. He liked to dine and drink well, and, though he considered it immoral and degrading, he could not refrain from the diversions of the bachelor circles in which he took part.

In the haze of his occupations and enthusiasms, however, Pierre, after the lapse of a year, began to feel that the ground of Freemasonry on which he stood slipped away beneath his feet the more firmly he tried to stand upon it. At the same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank beneath his feet, the more involuntarily he was bound to it. When he had entered upon Freemasonry, he had experienced the feeling of a man who confidently sets his foot on the smooth surface of a bog. Having set foot, he sank in. To make quite sure of the firmness of the ground on which he stood, he set his other foot down and sank in deeper still, got stuck, and now involuntarily waded knee-deep in the bog.

Osip Alekseevich was not in Petersburg. (Of late he had withdrawn from the affairs of the Petersburg lodges and lived without leaving Moscow.) All the brothers, members of the lodges, were people Pierre knew in life, and it was hard for him to see in them only brothers in Masonry, and not Prince B. or Ivan Vasilievich D., whom he knew in life mostly as weak and insignificant people. From under the Masonic aprons and insignia he saw on them the uniforms and crosses they had striven for in life. Often, collecting alms and reckoning up the twenty or thirty rubles entered to the credit account — and mostly on credit — from ten members, half of whom were as rich as himself, Pierre would recall the Masonic oath that each brother promised to give all his property for his neighbor; and doubts rose in his soul, on which he tried not to dwell.

All the brothers he knew he divided into four categories. To the first category he assigned brothers who took no active part either in the affairs of the lodges or in human affairs, but were occupied exclusively with the mysteries of the order's science, occupied with questions about the threefold designation of God, or about the three origins of things — sulphur, mercury, and salt — or about the meaning of the square and all the figures of the temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this category of Masonic brothers, to which the older brothers chiefly belonged, and Osip Alekseevich himself, in Pierre's opinion, but he did not share their interests. His heart did not incline to the mystical side of Freemasonry.

To the second category Pierre assigned himself and brothers like himself — seeking, wavering, not having yet found in Freemasonry a straight and comprehensible path, but hoping to find it.

To the third category he assigned brothers (these were the most numerous) who saw in Freemasonry nothing but the external form and ceremony, and prized the strict performance of this external form without caring about its content and meaning. Such were Villarsky and even the grand master of the chief lodge.

To the fourth category, finally, were assigned also a great number of brothers, especially those who had entered the brotherhood of late. These were people, by Pierre's observations, who believed in nothing and desired nothing, and who entered Freemasonry merely to draw close to the young, rich, and influential brothers, powerful in connections and rank, of whom there were a great many in the lodge.

Pierre was beginning to feel dissatisfied with his activity. Freemasonry, at least the Freemasonry he knew here, seemed to him sometimes to be founded on mere externals. He did not even think of doubting Freemasonry itself, but suspected that Russian Freemasonry had taken a false path and had deviated from its source. And therefore, at the end of the year, Pierre went abroad to be initiated into the higher mysteries of the order. —————

In the summer of 1809 Pierre returned to Petersburg. From the correspondence of our Masons with those abroad, it was known that Bezukhov had succeeded abroad in gaining the confidence of many highly placed persons, had penetrated many mysteries, had been raised to a higher degree, and was bringing back with him much for the common good of the Masonic cause in Russia. The Petersburg Masons all came to him, ingratiating themselves with him, and it seemed to everyone that he was concealing and preparing something.

A solemn session of the lodge of the second degree was appointed, at which Pierre promised to communicate what he had to convey to the Petersburg brothers from the higher leaders of the order. The session was full. After the usual ceremonies Pierre rose and began his speech.

— Dear brothers, — he began, blushing and stammering, and holding a written speech in his hand. — It is not enough to keep our mysteries in the quiet of the lodge — we must act... act. We are in a state of slumber, and we need to act. — Pierre took up his notebook and began to read.

"For the spreading of pure truth and the bringing about of the triumph of virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men of prejudice, spread principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, take upon ourselves the education of youth, unite ourselves by indissoluble bonds with the wisest of men, boldly and at the same time prudently overcome superstition, unbelief, and folly, and form out of those devoted to us men bound together by unity of purpose and possessing power and strength.

"To attain this end we must give virtue preponderance over vice, must strive that the honest man may obtain even in this world the eternal reward for his virtues. But in these great intentions we are greatly hindered by the present political institutions. What, then, is to be done in such a state of things? Are we to favor revolutions, overthrow everything, drive out force by force?... No, we are very far from that. Every violent reform deserves censure, because it will not in the least set right the evil so long as men remain what they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.

"The whole plan of the order should be founded on forming men firm, virtuous, and bound by unity of conviction — a conviction consisting in persecuting vice and folly everywhere and with all one's might, and in protecting talent and virtue: in raising worthy men from the dust, joining them to our brotherhood. Only then will our order have the power imperceptibly to bind the hands of the protectors of disorder and to govern them so that they do not perceive it. In a word, it is necessary to establish a universal ruling form of government that should be spread over the whole world, without destroying civil ties, and under which all other governments could go on in their ordinary order and do everything except what hinders the great aim of our order — that is, the bringing of virtue to triumph over vice. This aim was that of Christianity itself. It taught men to be wise and good, and for their own benefit to follow the example and precepts of the best and wisest of men.

"At a time when everything was plunged in darkness, preaching alone was, of course, sufficient: the novelty of truth gave it especial force; but now we need far more powerful means. Now it is necessary that man, governed by his senses, should find in virtue sensual delights. The passions cannot be eradicated; one must only strive to direct them to a noble aim, and therefore it is necessary that everyone should be able to satisfy his passions within the bounds of virtue, and that our order should furnish the means thereto.

"As soon as we have a certain number of worthy men in each state, each of them again forming two others, and all of them closely uniting with one another — then everything will be possible for the order, which has already secretly succeeded in doing much for the good of mankind."

This speech produced not only a strong impression but agitation in the lodge. The majority of the brothers, seeing in this speech dangerous designs of Illuminism, received his speech with a coldness that surprised Pierre. The grand master began to raise objections to Pierre. Pierre, with greater and greater ardor, began to develop his ideas. It was long since there had been so stormy a session. Parties formed: some accused Pierre, condemning him for Illuminism; others supported him. For the first time at this meeting Pierre was struck by the infinite variety of human minds, which makes it so that no truth presents itself in the same way to two people. Even those of the members who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way, with limitations and alterations to which he could not consent, since the chief need of Pierre consisted precisely in conveying his thought to another exactly as he himself understood it.

At the end of the session the grand master, with ill will and irony, made a remark to Bezukhov about his heat, and that not love of virtue alone but the passion of the struggle had guided him in the dispute. Pierre did not answer him and briefly asked whether his proposal would be accepted. He was told that it would not, and Pierre, without waiting for the usual formalities, left the lodge and drove home.